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Doug Elkins’s show at the Baryshnikov Arts Center (December 5th-8th) is a joy. The man in front of me cried. In the New York dance world of the nineteen-nineties, Elkins was the major comer. He seemed to have almost everything. His work was superbly dancey. He could play with rhythms like crazy. (He was a member of a break-dance crew when he was a teen-ager.) He was erudite; he seemed to know every dance style in the Western world. Which meant that he was constantly mixing high art with low, a maneuver that still looked new and exciting in the nineties. Ideas spilled out of him. His work was very funny, which endeared him to the general public. His dancers were wild, free, headlong. Lots of thigh. The company was a hit not just in the U.S. but also on the European festival circuit.

And then, in 2004 he folded it. The reason, he has said, was overload. He got married and had a child, so he didn’t want to be on the road all the time. He also figured that if he gave up touring for teaching, he would have time to make new work. Soon after he made that decision, his marriage broke up. “I had lost both my families,” he told Roslyn Sulcas, of the Times. “I was away from everyone who had tethered me in the world. I was in despair about it, and I wondered if I was ever going to feel like making anything again.” To my knowledge, he pretty much didn’t. People soon forgot his name, or remembered it sadly. Where did Elkins go?

In 2006 he finally created a new piece, “Fräulein Maria,” a parody of and valentine to “The Sound of Music.” He toured “Fräulein Maria” for years, and everybody loved it. (For several years running, it was performed at Joe’s Pub at Christmas time. People would cheer and bang their forks on the tables.) I loved it, too. But “Fräulein Maria” was a party piece. For all his huge talent, Elkins always showed an overreliance on adolescent charm. He liked to come out in front of the audience in his socks and do deadpan comedy. That is, he seemed immature. Maybe success came too early and easily for him. But who knows if it was easy? And lots of excellent artists have done their best, or most popular, work when they were young. What I am saying, though, is that “Fräulein Maria” did not constitute a comeback. One piece, in all those years?

Now, perhaps, he is making a comeback, or at least sticking his toe in the water. The concert at B.A.C. consists of two items, both of them revisions of earlier works of his. (He’s taking it slowly.) The jewel is “Mo(or)town/Redux,” a sort of hip-hop retelling of “Othello,” which is not, however, based primarily on Shakespeare’s “Othello,” but on José Limón’s famous adaptation of it, “The Moor’s Pavane,” from 1949. Limón’s piece had only four characters—Othello, Desdemona, Iago, and Emilia—and while they did enact the story (the handkerchief is passed, Desdemona is killed) they did it mostly by dancing, in a pinwheel (four-pointed) pattern and a solo-group-solo-group sequence. How brilliant of Limón to have imposed these formalities on Shakespeare’s almost unbearable story. They made it bearable.

Elkins wisely stole all that, and then brought it up to date. First, and most crucially, he changed the music from the Purcell compilation that Limón used to (mostly) Motown songs, the music of his own youth. And while Limón’s style was middle modern—angular, floor-bound, dignified—Elkins moved it up to hip-hop and a kind of free, flinging, modern modern-dance. The acting is also up to date. The duets for the two couples are notably sex-laden. All in all, Elkins has melded modern pop with Shakespeare, via Limón. Such a move, I guess, is partly ironic. (If so, then anyone who lived through the eighties and nineties is inured to such irony.) But the wonderful thing about the combination is the emotional pressure that it creates. We were forced to see the terrible events as true once again. Emilia’s tradeoff, the handkerchief for Iago’s affection; Desdemona’s mounting sorrow and, finally, her resignation (if Othello doesn’t love her, she doesn’t want to live): you feel these things on your skin. At a certain point, Desdemona goes to the side of the stage, bends over, and seems about to throw up; now she knows. You feel like throwing up with her. It’s hard not to thank Elkins for dignifying the makeout music of our youth by allying it with this revered tragedy. The Moor, too, heard it through the grapevine.

The dancers, as always with Elkins, are mostly extraordinary. Obviously, he has an excellent eye; he chooses well. But what is it that he does in coaching and rehearsing? I don’t know, but we reap the harvest. This group is not as good as his old company, because they haven’t worked with him and each other the way the old group had. Still, they deserve an award. For my money, the best dancer in “Mo(or)town” was the Emilia, Cori Marquis, digging so deep into her movement source and therefore coming out so strong and long. But I also loved the Desdemona, Donnell Oakley, for her combination of innocence and nobility; the Othello, Kyle Marshall, for his frank confusion; the Iago, Alexander Dones, with his nasty little smile. They gave you what they could of themselves. Nothing was faked.

If I’m remembering accurately, the other piece on this program, “Scott, Queen of Marys,” is close, in its current incarnation, to the original, 1994 version, when it was a showcase for Willi Ninja, the champion voguer of the eighties/nineties club scene. (You may remember him from “Paris Is Burning.”) Willi is now dead, and the voguer whom Elkins chose to replace him is Javier Ninja (né Javier Madrid), who, I am told, was a protégé of Willi’s. Call me irresponsible, but I liked him better than the famed Willi. Though gloriously affected, as a voguer should be, he is less insistent on how fabulous he is. At the same time, he seems to me just as skilled as Willi. He can make his elbows bend outwards. (It’s frightening. You look away.) He’s extremely skinny, which makes him endlessly bendable, a human Gumby.

Behind Javier, there were seven dancers whose steps, as far as I could see, had no relation to his. He came in; they partnered him; he pinched their butts. Then he went away, and they did group routines until he came back. This dance, more than any other Elkins piece I have seen, demonstrates his mastery of different dance forms. The cast does break-dancing, polka, Scottish step-dancing, “Turkey in the Straw,” and probably a lot of other things that I didn’t recognize. The piece is witty and charming and way too long. After a while, the differences among the dancers had to do not with their ability or artistry, but simply with their endurance. By the end, Cori Marquis and Alexander Dones were still going strong, but most of the others looked ready to drop on the floor.

“Scott, Queen of Marys” was a loving tribute to Willi Ninja and to his world. Now, however, drag balls and even club dancing in general are not the sensations they used to be. I hope that Elkins will retire the piece and create new dances. Come back, Doug Elkins! Make a lot of stuff and don’t worry about it. For a while, everybody’s going to love anything you do; they’ll be so happy to see you again.

Photograph by Julieta Cervantes.

Joan Acocella has written for The New Yorker, mostly on books and dance, since 1992, and became the magazine’s dance critic in 1998.